What the Women of Women on 20s Think of Women on Tens

“A woman is nowhere to be found on any of our seven paper bills,” Jack Lew, the Treasury Secretary, said on Thursday. “That is wrong, and it needs to change.”

Photograph by Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP

On Wednesday afternoon, Barbara Ortiz Howard, who owns an exterior-restoration business in Mount Vernon, New York, and Susan Ades Stone, a journalist and Howard’s friend, were asked to join a call with some government officials. In March, Howard and Ades Stone had started a campaign to demand that the U.S. government replace Andrew Jackson’s image on the twenty-dollar bill with a woman from history. Their goal was to have this happen by 2020, the centennial anniversary of women getting the right to vote. They invited people to vote for their favorite candidates on a Web site they set up, WomenOn20s.org, and the campaign went viral. I wrote about it, as did many others, including Gail Collins of the Times (“Finally, we’ve got a current event that’s not depressing”). Susan Sarandon and other celebrities lent their support, and more than five hundred thousand people voted. In May, Howard and Ades Stone announced the winner: Harriet Tubman. In the phone call, Rosie Rios, the United States Treasurer, and some White House officials wanted to inform them that the message had been received—sort of.

There would be a woman on a bill, they learned, but it might not end up being Tubman. The Treasury Secretary would make the final decision at a later point, based partly on public input. Also, the chosen female would be featured on the ten-dollar note, rather than on the twenty. And she wouldn’t exactly replace the man on that bill, Alexander Hamilton; instead, ten-dollar bills would feature both Hamilton and the woman. As for the 2020 deadline, the Treasury Department hoped to finalize the design by then, but it would take longer to get the bill into circulation. Treasury officials stopped short of crediting Women on 20s for spurring the decision, but they thanked Ades Stone and Howard for raising awareness.

Ades Stone told me over the phone that the phone call was the first she had heard of the Treasury Department’s plans. Last night, after getting off the phone with the Treasury Department, she and Howard headed to Washington, where Jack Lew, the Treasury Secretary, was to detail his plans in a press conference on Thursday afternoon. Ades Stone’s husband drove their car while she typed out a press release from the passenger’s seat. “When Secretary Lew makes his choice, we hope he will take into account that the winner of our online poll, Harriet Tubman, was the top vote-getter,” it read.

Ades Stone said that she considered the Treasury Department’s decision a success for her and Howard’s campaign. But she sounded a bit piqued, and when I pressed her she admitted that this wasn’t only because she hadn’t got much sleep. For a number of reasons, she and others weren’t altogether satisfied with the execution of the Treasury Department’s plans. Howard and Ades Stone had chosen the twenty-dollar bill in part because of Jackson’s poor reputation; he opposed central banking and was largely responsible for the expulsion of Native Americans from their homes. “We’ll still have to be looking at Andrew Jackson for quite a bit longer, and that’s a shame,” Ades Stone told me.

On the Facebook page for the Women on 20s campaign, some of the most-liked comments criticized the Treasury Department’s decision. “Women ask to be on the $20, so we get offered the $10,” one person wrote. “Never, never give a woman what she asks for.” Another commented, “Placing a woman on a bill with Alexander Hamilton makes the same sexist statement that our currency has made all along—that a woman cannot be independent or important without a man.” And, “A man gets ‘final say’ over which woman. This feels like a slap in the face.”

The Treasury Department said that it had good reasons for its approach. The ten-dollar bill was already in the process of being redesigned, in part to safeguard against security threats. And it is produced in relatively low numbers, which will make it easier to insure a smoother transition. (The Treasury Department makes minor changes to bills all the time, but it hasn’t changed a portrait on a bill since the nineteen-twenties.) The department also pointed out that it is trying to be more democratic than usual. While the Treasury Secretary has final say on banknote designs, and usually takes advice only from the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, this time Lew and other officials plan to spend the summer holding public meetings to get citizens’ input. There’s even a hashtag, #TheNew10, and a Web site, thenewten.treasury.gov, where people are invited to share their ideas. Already, the Treasury Department’s own announcement has gone viral; as of early Thursday morning, it was a trending story on Facebook.

When I spoke to Ades Stone, she told me that she hadn’t seen the Treasury Department’s Web site yet. But, she said, Howard had checked it out and informed her that it looked awfully similar to WomenOn20s.org. “I do believe they took pages out of our playbook,” she said. I got the impression that she felt the Women on 20s campaign had been co-opted, and didn’t know how to feel about it. Standing in line at the White House, where she and Howard were supposed to meet with some officials, she sounded a bit out of her element. “Barbara, Barbara!” she called out. “I’m in the right line? I’m in the wrong line? Is this the line for appointments?”

A couple of hours later, Lew appeared at the scheduled press conference. “A woman is nowhere to be found on any of our seven paper bills,” he said. “That is wrong, and it needs to change.” He said he had many people to thank for their involvement in the decision, and named several institutions: the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve, the Secret Service. He talked a bit more about the decision. Then, toward the end of his comments, he briefly mentioned the Women on 20s campaign. “We thank you for your passion and your citizenship,” he said. “Your campaign is exactly what democracy is about—making your voice heard.”

Research suggests that women who stand up for themselves in negotiations may not get what they want. The tactic may even backfire.

As the years passed, Tom grew more entrenched in his homelessness. He was absorbed in lofty fantasies and private missions, aware of the basest necessities and the most transcendent abstractions, and almost nothing in between.